“Ethical living: relinking ethics and consumption through care in Chile and Brazil”

Tomás Ariztía, Nurjk Agloni, Léna Pellandini-Simányi

Abstract

Mainstream conceptualizations of ‘ethical consumption’ equate the notion with conscious, individual, market-mediated choices motivated by ethical or political aims that transcend ordinary concerns. Drawing on recent sociology and anthropology of consumption literature on the links between ordinary ethics and ethical consumption, this article discusses some of the limitations of this conceptualization. Using data from 32 focus groups conducted in Chile and Brazil, we propose a conceptualization of ethical consumption that does not centre on individual, market-mediated choices but understands it at the level of practical outcomes, which we refer to as different forms of ‘ethical living’. To do that, we argue, we need to depart from the deontological understanding of ethics that underpins mainstream approaches to ethical consumption and adopt a more consequentialist view focusing on ethical outcomes. We develop these points through describing one particular ordinary moral regime that seemed to be predominant in participants’ accounts of ethics and consumption in both Chile and Brazil: one that links consumption and ethics through care. We show that the moral regime of care leads to ‘ethical outcomes’, such as energy saving or limiting overconsumption, yet contrary to the mainstream view of ethical consumption emphasizing politicized choice expressed through markets, these result from following ordinary ethics, often through routines of practices.

“ConsumptionNorms and Everyday Ethics offers a systematic analysis of everyday consumption norms by discussing different contemporary theoretical accounts of the links between consumption, norms and ethics. Author Pellandini-Simányi, who teaches in the Department of Media and Communication at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary, takes a cultural standpoint and situates everyday consumption practices as embedded in moral repertoires. Thus it can be placed in the same line as other culturally oriented views of consumption whose origins can be found in cultural sociology, anthropology and material culture studies. The book is part of the Consumption and Public Life series at Palgrave Macmillan, edited by Frank Trentmann and Richard Wilk […] Overall I think that this book provides a welcome contribution to the growing body of literature focused on examining consumption moralities by presenting a broad and well-crafted theoretical examination of the normative dimension of everyday consumption.” Continue reading →

Based on novel historiographical research, Natalia Milanesio’s book: Workers Go Shopping in Argentina: The Rise of Popular Consumer Culture (Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 2013) illuminates the transformative experience of mass consumption during the Perón years in Argentina. Although unionisation, minimum wage requirements and work regulations increased the purchasing power of the working classes during the 1950s, Milanesio argues that advertisers, the press and state officials also helped turn workers into consumers by imagining and debating their integration into market society in certain ways. According to Milanesio’s finegrained account, mass-market participation during this period altered both private and public life, challenging gender relations within households as well as class distinctions in the public sphere. But Milanesio’s capacious argument goes further. She sees the rise of popular consumer culture as nothing less than cause and consequence of the structural transformations of mid-twentieth century Argentina. Working-class consumers became modernising agents of social change, helping to shape a new commercial ethos, transform social relations and collective identities, as well as redefining the role of the state as a mediator between business and clients.

[From Charisma-Network] Call for a papers for a Workshop in the Sociology Department at the University of Warwick, February 13th 2015. Everyday Market Lives. Organised by Lynne Pettinger (Sociology, Warwick) and Liz Moor (Media & Communications, Goldsmiths)*. Deadline for abstracts: 31st October 2014.

Capitalist societies routinely ask people to make judgements of value and worth, and to decide between an array of competing choices, as part of their everyday lives. Economic knowledge and expertise is thus not something that resides only with bankers, financial journalists and government accountants; it exists in a tacit form within the routines of daily life in capitalist society, and is a key part of people’s experiences at work, in consumption, in leisure, in media use, in practices of caring for children and elderly relatives, or in financial planning and household management. Continue reading →